Hello, again all! Continuing with this month’s spooky theme, I’ve decided to dip back into the well of Edgar Allan Poe, and talk about another one of his most popular stories, “The Pit and the Pendulum.”

It involves that which no one expects: the Spanish Inquisition.

So we start off with some unnamed rando being sentenced to death by the aforementioned Inquisition for completely unknown reasons. Though, based on what the Inquisition’s goals were, we can probably hazard a guess. Seriously, this was not a great time to be Jewish, Muslim, or anything other than Catholic, really.

Anyway, the guy hears his sentence read and immediately faints. Get used to this, because it happens quite often in this story. He wakes up to find that he’s unbound and in what he first assumes to be a tomb, but which he quickly realizes is actually a room. He does a bit of a circuit along the wall and, after fainting again, realizes it’s about 100 steps in circumference. So, not exactly palatial, but he starts thinking that this probably is’t the worst situation.

His assessment changes when he trips and almost falls into the ludicrously deep pit located in the center of the room. Which they apparently hoped he’d fall in.

It becomes apparent pretty quickly that Poe’s version of the Spanish Inquisition operates on Bond villain logic.

Anyway, this understandably freaks him out quite a bit, and he shakily makes his way back to the wall, freaking out a bit over what other tortures might be waitin or him. Eventually, though, he does manage to fall asleep, and finds that his captors left him food and water, which he ingests. Of course, the food turns out to be drugged, and he passes out yet again.

When he wakes up, there’s actually some light and he can see that he greatly overestimated the size of his cell. Turns out that he missed the scrap of cloth he put on the wall to mark where he started and made 2 circuits around the room instead of one.

Oh, and he’s also tied to a table with a giant, bladed pendulum swinging above him, and inching closer. And, of course, he faints again.

So, this whole situation sucks, but the narrator actually manages to get out of it. How, you may ask? By enticing the local rat population into coming over and chewing through his bonds. They manage to do it just before the pendulum comes crashing down, too.

Except it turns out that it’s not that easy. You know the garbage compactor scene from Star Wars, when the walls start closing in? Yeah, that’s basically what happens here, with the added bonus of it pushing him towards the pit.

Thankfully, he’s saved via deus ex machina, when some dude grabs him and pulls him away from the pit. See, the dude’s with the French army, who’ve stormed and managed to wrest Toledo away from the Spanish, so no more inquisiting today. And that, my friends, is where the story ends.

So, I love me some Poe, as you can probably imagine, but I honestly think “The Pit and the Pendulum” is one of his weaker tales. Don’t get me wrong, he’s masterful at creating suspense here (the passages where he’s describing the pendulum’s descent are delightfully tense), but honestly, the chosen execution methods are kinda goofy. Seriously, the shit that the Spanish Inqusition pulled were already pretty horrifying on their own.

Also, did you know that the Spanish Inquistion (which started in 1468) wasn’t officially disbanded until 1834? I was today years old when I learned that.